What began as a powerful anti-Palestinian campaign by a few Zionist organisations and individuals turned into a victory for Adelaide Writers' Week (AWW) and the Palestinian writers who attended.
The sessions featuring the Palestinians, particularly those held in conjunction with Australian First Nations writers, were phenomenally popular; hundreds of people attended these sessions.
As Louise Adler said, “People are free to deeply object. They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think. But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”
“The definition proposed for adoption by the South Australian parliament is one devised by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (or IHRA). It is a flawed definition because it singles out one group of people for special treatment. This motion is specific to Israel and to Israel only. The motion moved by One Nation’s Sarah Game gives Israel a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
The motion itself determines the ways in which we might be allowed to criticise Israel without finding ourselves labelled as antisemitic.”
"Over 70 years later, it is becoming increasingly common to come across analogies between Palestinian refugees such as the ones from Lydda and Ramle, and the "simultaneous uprooting" of Jews living in Arab countries. Israel's Deputy Minister of Finance Yitzhak Cohen, for example, has said that: "The uprooted Jews' problem is equal to, if not greater than, the Palestinian refugees' problem.""
"My mother, Taube, and father, Abraham, survived Auschwitz among other horrors. My father was the only survivor in his family of six children and my mother survived with only one sister in a family that was larger than my father’s. I know, without question, that if they were alive today, the motion you are being asked to endorse would terrify them given the repression of tolerance and witness that it clearly embraces."
"So it’s time to fantasize, to dream about a general election, but a different kind, a dream about democracy. It won’t happen soon, but one day it will. Israel will have to become a democracy because it doesn’t have the right to exist otherwise. Without real elections, it’s not a democracy. What it imagines as democratic is an electoral trick. A fundamental rule in democracies is the universal right to vote. One person, one vote."
"The Eurovision in Israel was already a highly politicized event, which was even pointed out by Netta, last year’s winner, who said after her win that “we have done something crazy [fantastic] for Israeli Hasbara”. Just one small sign of this was how Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster, used the occasion for marketing occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories as “Israel”."
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